I’m currently writing the converter routines for Skills, and a thought occurred to me.
RPG Maker 2003 has “skill subsets,” which are groups of skills that are filed under their own commands categories. When designing a skill, you can classify it as Normal, Teleport, Escape, or Switch, the same four classic skill styles RM 2000 used, or as a member of any of the skill subsets. If you pick a subset, the design page for the skill is identical to the page for Normal, because they essentially are Normal skills, just classified differently to the user.
This seems like a silly way to do things to me, for a couple reasons. First off, if it’s a Normal skill, why introduce unnecessary complexity by defining it as something other than a Normal skill? Second, it makes subsets exclusive. In Final Fantasy V, a White Mage had a skillset command to use white magic, but a Red Mage’s red magic skillset also contained white magic. In order to do that under RM 2003, you’d need to create multiple copies of each spell you wanted to place in multiple skillsets.
RM 2003 just defines skillsets as names, and then assigns skills to them from the skill designer page. I think a better way to do it would be to define skillsets as lists, and assign skills to them from a skillset designer page. That seems to me to be a much simpler solution. But I don’t have all that much experience in RM 2003 game design, so before I go enforcing a change in style on my users based on pure theory, I’d like a bit of feedback. Can any RM 2003 designers weigh in with the pros and cons of this option?
PROS: a better way to do things. Obviously, very helpful in making flexible and more complex systems
CONS: adds to the worries of the maker. Might be prevented if the option to classify skill s is optional or there is a General list..
The “general list” would be the default. All skills go into the “General” category, but then if you want to also put them in other categories, you can.